Bob Lutz is perhaps the most charismatic, controversial, and quote-worthy executive in the business. At 82, “Maximum Bob” is still about everything you’ve ever read—straight-talking, unfiltered, and staunchly opinionated. A few examples of the latter: on used-car shopping (“For a guy at your stage in life, you should get a C6 Corvette”) or his time at Lotus (“If I’d been the private equity guys, I would have fired myself”). And man, can he throw back some sushi. Hold the wasabi, here we go.

Lutz was in Detroit promoting his latest endeavor, Via Motors, which converts General Motors vans and pickups to plug-in hybrids. First launched three years ago, Via is finally in production. It’s one of many gigs Lutz has landed since his “retirement” from GM in 2009. Another is VL Automotive, which repowers Fisker Karmas with Corvette engines.

Car and Driver: When will we see your VL Destino, the ZR1-powered Fisker that’s promising 200 mph?

Bob Lutz: We’re fully certified now and ready to start delivering cars. We bought ourselves a substantial supply of Fiskers—from dealers, unsold factory inventory. We bought a bunch of gliders when they were heading for Chapter 11 and they didn’t have battery packs anyway because A123 had gone belly up. They said, “Hey, would you be interested in cars without battery packs?” We said, sure, it just makes our job easier. So we’ve been sitting on an inventory of 30, 35 brand-new Fiskers. Then we’ve got a very substantial body of Fisker owners who want the car converted. I think we should be delivering this quarter.

C/D: Is VL considered an OEM, or a tuner for Fiskers?

BL: I was worried that without the help of a large corporation and without a big engineering staff, this shoestring budget and farming everything out, I was really worried about how all this was going to work out. But I gotta tell you, the car is superb. What I was worried about was with the change in mass, going from 5200 pounds to roughly 3900 to 4000 pounds, what was going to happen to ride and handling? And it was sensational. It really is like a four-door Corvette. We will be a so-called MOR, a manufacturer of record, and we had to do everything, OBD-II, the whole nine yards, just like any large manufacturer.

C/D: How long do you think you can keep this going, given that Fisker is out of production?

BL: I think we can keep it going for a long time, because once Fisker starts up again, they’ll sell us gliders. As far as the body is concerned, we’ll design a very nice follow-up car with the same proportions. We’ve got some very, very nice design suggestions, and then we’ll tool that ourselves in aluminum. If you tool in vacuum-formed aluminum, which the Fisker is anyway, that’s not very expensive tooling. We think we can retool a full exterior of the car and replicate the chassis from a basic underbody structure. The suspension and all that is all GM anyway. The whole car was GM except for the electrical portion—power steering, air conditioning system, all GM. Instead of buying it from Fisker we’ll buy directly from GM. We just duplicate the chassis tooling and keep having it made by a supplier or weld it up ourselves. And then contract with an aluminum vacuum-formed outfit. You know, we’re only talking a couple of hundred cars a year. Remember the Panoz Roadster?

C/D: Oh yes.

BL: That was vacuum-formed aluminum, it was a company called Superform. They had only the body tools and one great big epoxy plate, and that epoxy plate would go into a chamber, and they’d clamp a piece of aluminum over it, and they’d seal it all off with rubber seals, screw it all together. They’d heat the aluminum to about 380 degrees. Then they’d introduce a vacuum on top over the aluminum sheet and pressure on the lower part, and that hot aluminum forms this huge bubble gum blister. Then they’d flip the switch and the vacuum goes to the bottom and the pressure goes to the top and that whole sheet of aluminum goes pssshhhhtttt! It gets sucked over all the body shapes and then it comes out of the autoclave and it gets located onto the table, and then the laser trimmer takes about two minutes to cut all the body parts from the aluminum sheet. In 15 minutes, they could do all the body parts for Panoz. We could do the same thing.

C/D: Would you stick with four doors or do another body style?

BL: An extreme high-performance four-door is a good market segment for us, because high-performance two doors and mid-engine cars, that field is getting crowded.

C/D: That’s interesting you mention mid-engine. We were just reporting about the mid-engine Corvette mule and had heard it was in development before GM’s bankruptcy. Care to share anything?

BL: I have no idea whether they’re going to do a mid-engine Corvette or not, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was one in the mill. But what happens is, this would be about the fifth time that a mid-engine Corvette has been in the mill, and then you get an economic downturn and it’s the first thing that gets cast aside.

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Actually, the C7 was going to be mid-engine. Tadge said, ‘I can’t do a good car if you don’t let me go mid-engine.’

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C/D: How good do you think the mid-engine Corvette is going to be?

BL: I think they would unquestionably do a good job with it. Actually, the C7 was going to be mid-engine. The reason Tadge Juechter wanted to do it is because you get to a certain limit of how much power you can put down with the engine in the front, and Tadge showed us simulations to where you could go to 700 horsepower and 750 horsepower and it wasn’t going to do any good. To get the power down, a rear-mid-engine formula is really good. Tadge said, “I can’t do a good car if you don’t let me go mid-engine.” His mid-engine budget got canceled and they said, “Tadge, you’re going to have to do it and you don’t have the budget for a mid-engine car.” So after about a three-day sulk, he was told, do another front mid-engine. The issue was, to get the weight distribution we needed, the engine had to be moved back and you couldn’t do it with an X-shaped hydroformed frame. The solution, why the C7 is so good and why it is getting the power down, is because they added two inches of wheelbase and they were able to get the engine more towards the back. And it’s a lighter engine. Anyway, we should talk about Via . . .

C/D: Right. How viable are plug-in-electric pickups or vans, really?

BL: I think they’re extremely viable. Even with gasoline at $1.80 a gallon, these things in a city environment—a full-size van, a full-size pickup—you’re looking at eight miles per gallon. If you could take that eight miles per gallon to 100 miles per gallon, let’s face it, this is a green vehicle that doesn’t have to be sold to people with a green philosophy. It gets sold to people who know about saving money. And that’s why we’re concentrating on fleets, like hotel shuttles. Or urban delivery vehicles—FedEx, Coca-Cola for their vending-machine repairmen, these things see 50, 60 miles a day and it’ll be mostly on battery. So even at today’s fuel costs, depending on how much you use the truck, you could see fuel savings equivalent to the monthly lease cost for the vehicle. You’re basically getting a vehicle for free or almost for free.

BL: Yes, we’ve delivered 50, and 200 more in the next couple weeks. I was just talking to a Canadian company called Sun Energy and they’ve ordered 1000. The only thing we’re delivering right now is the van, but the pickup is end of February.

C/D: Since your retirement from GM, you’ve advised Lotus, converted a plug-in hybrid to a Corvette, and converted Chevy pickups into plug-in hybrids. What are you going to try next?

BL: I want to write a novel. The reason I want to do it is because publishers all say guys who write business books can’t write novels.